Cancer Frontline

September 2014
Archive

Knock out a mutated gene that’s a driving force behind pancreatic
cancer and a few cancer cells quietly remain behind, where they hunker
down in the resulting scar tissue and nibble on themselves to survive
before roaring back as resistant pancreatic cancer.

“Therapies that target specific, mutated genes can have an
incredible initial impact. Cancerous lesions disappear, but they all
come back, all of them,” said Giulio Draetta...

A tailor-made suit sewn to fit a customer’s exact measurements almost
always fits better than one purchased “off the rack.”

Researchers at MD Anderson are applying this same logic to cancer
medicine, where tumors from patients with difficult-to-treat cancers
are individually analyzed, then drugs and other therapies are
prescribed to attack each tumor’s one-of-a-kind genetic and molecular makeup.